"In Leftism Reinvented: Western Parties from Socialism to Neoliberalism, Mudge looks at left parties in advanced capitalist countries over the last century and shows how the experts aligned with those parties pushed them in the direction of spin doctors and markets. In the process, left parties’ ability to represent the interests of their own working-class constituencies was eroded — and ordinary people were shut out of the halls of power."

"Rethinking communism for the twenty-first century. Since Alain Badiou first formulated the “communist hypothesis” in The Meaning of Sarkozy, it has become a concept that has acted as a reorienting focus for the Left. Adopted and discussed by a wide range of Left thinkers, this debate holds out hope for a revitalized communist movement. "

"The following is an exchange between Tim Barker, assistant editor at Dissent, and James Livingston, professor of history at Rutgers University and author, most recently, of Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture is Good for the Economy, the Environment, and Your Soul. In this exchange, Barker and Livingston argue about the thesis of that book as well as a number of recent essays by Livingston on socialism and socialists."

"However, as someone might have said but I think did not, the victorious get to write the dictionaries, and so “socialism” came to mean, in the twentieth century, whatever Stalin and his henchmen were up to. The success of a peasant revolution in China which also wrapped itself in the mantle of Marx pretty much sealed the fate of the word. The collapse of the Soviet empire then permitted the beneficiaries and celebrators of advanced post-industrial and financial capitalism to proclaim the world historical victory of capitalism over socialism. Socialism, it was said, was dead, save for the effete and incomprehensible dithering of some European folks who, since they spoke foreign languages, could be conveniently ignored.

The effect of this series of historical conjunctures was to take us all back to the period of the early nineteenth century, when capitalism was equated with rationality simpliciter. And by a rather devious, not to say diabolical, maneuver, capitalism was equated with the rule of markets. To criticize capitalism was thus to suggest that markets were unnecessary."

"There are therefore four logical combinations of the two oppositions, resource abundance vs. scarcity and egalitarianism vs. hierarchy. To put things in somewhat vulgar-Marxist terms, the first axis dictates the economic base of the post-capitalist future, while the second pertains to the socio-political superstructure. Two possible futures are socialisms (only one of which I will actually call by that name) while the other two are contrasting flavors of barbarism."

"Guy Aldred is an obscure but important figure in the history of socialist thought. He sometimes crops up in histories of British socialism, syndicalist and labour organisation, but rarely in discussions of socialist theory. "

Rosa Luxemburg’s letters have been published in English before, but this collection, of which about two-thirds are newly translated, has delivered to us a real, recognizable human being. In the previous volumes, Luxemburg often seemed uniformly heroic

"Can capitalism work in the interests of working people? Mervyn King has, inadvertently, revived this old question*. Last night, he pointed to falling real wages and said:

The squeeze in living standards is the inevitable price to pay for the financial crisis and subsequent rebalancing of the world and UK economies.

But this just raises the question: why must the squeeze be upon workers in the form of falling wages, rather than capitalists in the form of lower profits? As Duncan says, the question of who pays that bill is a political choice."

For Lessig the hybrid economy works as long as the user feels she is getting something back, as long as the exchange feels fair to her. But the socialist critique is that that feeling is wrong and needs to be corrected.

On the main point, I totally agree. We really need to hear leftwing voices in the mainstream media. Where we may disagree is, to some extent, on a labeling or definition refinement... liberals are not leftists.